Making urban road pricing acceptable and effective: searching for quality and equity in urban mobility
Section snippets
Fighting congestion with urban road pricing: from economists’ preferences to politicians’ fears
Urban road pricing has long been in the list of preferred approaches by economists to solve the urban traffic congestion problem. The introduction of prices to manage demand of private car access to city centre has been recognised by economists as a powerful instrument (Vickrey, 1963, Button, 1995), and numerous research projects and publications have been dedicated to developing models and showing the expected results of such measures on road traffic saturation levels: Even if we cover only EU
Objectives in the broad picture: efficiency, effectiveness, acceptability
If we consider the arguments put forward by economists in the discussions about this issue of congestion and road pricing as a measure to fight it, the objective of efficiency always comes forward, in most cases associated with prices based on marginal social costs.
If we accept dominance of the efficiency objective, this approach is certainly correct in a theoretical world where all prices would be based on marginal social costs, but creates some risks in the real world where many prices are
Equity and accountability at centre stage of acceptability
Besides efficiency, equity and sustainability are normally taken as basic objectives in the definition of transport policy. Sustainability objectives may well be integrated in the efficiency objective if we are able to adequately represent the costs of the resources consumed in the process, through internalisation of external costs, and this has been shown in the FISCUS project (FISCUS, 2000) to be possible (with some margin for error) in the urban mobility setting, even if relatively poor data
Aiming at quality of the mobility system, based on a mix of pricing and rationing
Congestion pricing is easy to explain, and in fact it is widely applied in many sectors of the economy subject to peaks in demand, like hotels in the holiday season, publicity in TV shows, etc. But in these and other cases, we are dealing with free markets, and price setting is guided by considerations that have nothing to do with equity and fairness.
Transport economists have argued time and again that the search for maximum efficiency in the provision of a scarce resource is achieved by
Conclusions
We have argued that there has been a great divide between economists and politicians about road pricing because the former have adopted a much more restricted set of the objectives than the latter, giving too much emphasis to the issues of efficiency, which are hard to understand and convey to the population, and paying less attention to the more visible aspects of effectiveness of congestion relief and equity.
We propose a wider objective of quality in all dimensions of the mobility system,
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